Next Vision, Next Game-Change, NextAxiom
SAIC Smart Grid-as-a-Service Case Study:
NextAxiom Intelligent Information Flow Platform
The Smart Grid Vision: 21st Century Utility Industry Transformation
Forward-thinkers in the electricity industry have unified around the 21st century vision of the ‘smart grid’—
an intelligent, IT-advantaged approach to power delivery and power markets. Over the long term, the smart
grid vision seeks to transform the utility industry by making it more customer-interactive, more self-healing
(in the event of a power disruption), and more defensible in the event of a cyber-attack or natural disaster.
The Smart Grid Vision
In the near term, the smart grid vision is focused on:
IT & Energy Operations Convergence: Baked into the smart grid vision is the notion of Advanced
Metering Infrastructure (AMI), also referred to as ‘smart meters’. Smart meters, unlike legacy meters,
enable always-on 2-way interactivity between utilities and their customers. Smart meters enable
improved operations, labor savings, and enhanced visibility into energy consumption.
Consumer Participation & Empowerment: The smart grid vision also speaks directly to the issue of
empowering consumers to participate directly in the future success of the grid through more intelligent
and cost-effective consumption of electric power, as well as to profitably make their own renewable
energy (e.g. home based solar) available for resale by the utility industry.
New Market Emergence: While IT/operations convergence and expanded customer empowerment are
outstanding benefits in and of themselves, the smart grid vision goes further—enabling new energyrelated markets to emerge. For example, with a smart grid foundation in place, a new generation of
‘smart appliances’ are on the horizon, as well as consumer self-directed ‘smart home’ management
services. Additionally, the smart grid vision will accelerate adoption of green renewable energy (solar,
wind), as well as greener battery-powered vehicles.
Improved Security & Reliability: In the post-9/11 world, critical infrastructure like electric utilities
are now perceived as potential targets for both physical and cyber-attack—and can benefit from the
improved security and system reliability baked into the smart grid vision. Additionally, when outages do
occur, the system as a whole is more reliable and self-healing—while providing utilities and consumers
with near-real-time visibility into events occurring on the grid.
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“Smart grid-as-a-service
will deliver the immediate
advantage of on-demand
meter reads, improved operational efficiency, as well
as reduced energy cost, and
will support critical energy
management decisions
throughout the remote
regions of Alaska.”
- Assistant Vice President of
Smart Grid, Steve Root, SAIC
For large, well-capitalized utilities, smart grid experimental pilots and field deployments have
been underway for some time. But for many utilities, the large capital investments necessary
to deliver on the promise of the smart grid have become prohibitive, especially against the
background of a challenged economy. This economic speed bump can really slow down smart
grid adoption. Technology innovator SAIC has creatively addressed this through their gamechanging Smart Grid-as-a-Service offering.
SAIC Smart Grid-as-a-Service: Changing the Game in Smart Grid Adoption
SAIC is a FORTUNE 500® scientific, engineering, and technology applications company that
uses its deep domain knowledge to solve problems of vital importance to the nation and the
world, in national security, energy & environment, health and cybersecurity. The company’s
approximately 41,000 employees serve customers in the U.S. Department of Defense, the
intelligence community, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, other U.S. Government
civil agencies and selected commercial markets. Headquartered in McLean, Va., SAIC had
annual revenues of approximately $10.6 billion for its fiscal year ended January 31, 2012.
Within the smart grid industry, SAIC has emerged as a first mover and first prover in delivering
cloud-advantaged Smart Grid-as-a-Service or SGS. SAIC’s SGS offering was designed from
the ground up to remove smart grid barriers to adoption for local utilities. How? By providing
a modular, customizable, affordable subscription service that enables utility management
to focus on their core business of energy operations—not the complexity of IT systems
development and integration that goes hand in hand with smart grid enablement.
SAIC’s SGS also enables local utilities to leapfrog beyond the pilot phase of smart grid
experimentation, and move confidently into a smart grid future with total ROI clarity and zero
obsolescence. Additionally, SAIC’s SGS offering, while leveraging the systems best practices
and scale economics of large utilities, is not tied to any one infrastructure vendor roadmap—
making SGS a true game changer in the smart grid market.
SAIC’s Smart Grid-as-a-Service makes available the full spectrum of smart grid functionality,
including:
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Smart Meters: installation and deployment of meters and smart meter head end
Field Communications: including real-time outage alerts
Enhanced Security: for defense against cyber-attacks
Cross-Application IT Integration: including back-office applications, business process
customization, and both consumer and management portal development.
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Validating its game-changing SGS strategy, SAIC was awarded a contract by Intelligent Energy Systems
(IES) for smart grid solutions for four Alaskan communities. SAIC and IES implemented SAIC’s Smart Gridas-a-Service at these locations, and services have been on-line and running since December 2011.
The Alaskan deployment of SGS, an integrated hardware and software solution, provides advanced
metering infrastructure, outage alerts, remote connection capabilities, as well as lays the foundation for
the future integration of fuel, water, temperature, and alternative energy metering. SAIC’s SGS provides
a complete community energy management environment on an OPEX subscription basis—just what
was needed to lower energy costs and reduce dependence on expensive diesel fuel that has historically
devastated local village economies.
“The challenges of climate, environment, and information technology are especially great in these
regions,” said SAIC Assistant Vice President of Smart Grid, Steve Root. “Smart Grid-as-a-Service will deliver
the immediate advantage of on-demand meter reads, improved operational efficiency, as well as reduced
energy cost, and will support critical energy management decisions throughout the remote regions of
Alaska.”
As a core ingredient of the SGS solution, SAIC leveraged NextAxiom’s hyperService Platform to provide
must-have cross-silo integration and unified intelligent information flow.
NextAxiom hyperServices: Intelligent Information Flow for Smart Grid-as-a-Service
An important design criteria for SAIC’s offering was to enable intelligent information flow across all
devices and line of business applications encompassed by the game-changing vision of cloud-powered
Smart Grid-as-a-Service. Rather than get locked in to the capital-intensive roadmaps and proprietary
add-ons of legacy enterprise middleware vendors, SAIC selected NextAxiom’s hyperService Platform to
serve as the foundation of, and provide the universal building blocks for, all cross-silo integration within
the SGS cloud service.
In the words of Tim Crowell, Lead Architect of SAIC’s SGS offering, “With NextAxiom hyperServices we get
a built-in services oriented architecture or ‘automatic SOA’ right out of the box.”
With the automatic SOA capability inherent in the NextAxiom Platform, any hyperService can be
consumed as a standards-based Web Service operation by line-of-business applications—and viceversa, any external Web Service operation can be consumed automatically as a managed hyperService.
A hyperService solution is composed of in-memory hyperService building blocks all the way down the
solution stack, and is inherently service-oriented at both design-time and runtime.
In addition to NextAxiom’s automatic SOA capability, the SAIC Smart Grid-as-a-Service offering leverages
many additional capabilities of the NextAxiom Intelligent Information Flow Platform, including:
Universality: To deliver on the promise of SGS, many different line-of-business applications need to
be coherently orchestrated to support a unified user experience. This requirement is addressed via the
hyperService approach pioneered and proven by NextAxiom. A NextAxiom hyperService is a universal
building block that can represent any application or system function, regardless of the underlying
architecture. This capability of the NextAxiom platform enables hyperServices to transform functions
from heterogeneous systems into universal, homogenous building blocks, thus incrementally eliminating
application silos. This capability is foundational to NextAxiom’s mission of enabling the silo-free
enterprise. For example, within the SGS offering, NextAxiom hyperServices serve as building blocks of
intelligent information flow connecting the outage and GIS systems to the customer portal—a musthave capability for a smart grid system.
Location Transparency: The hyperServices utilized by SAIC’s breakthrough cloud-based, Smart Gridas-a-Service are essentially virtualized programming building blocks that are transparently distributed
across cores, servers and datacenters whether on-premise or in the cloud. For example, once an onpremise application function is represented as a hyperService, it can be accessed seamlessly from the
cloud or a device, e.g. a smart meter.
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“With NextAxiom
hyperServices we get
a built-in services
oriented architecture
or ‘automatic SOA’
right out of the box.”
- Tim Crowell,
Lead Architect of SAIC’s
SGS offering
Granular Management: In mission critical infrastructure like Smart Grid-as-a-Service, full granular
management is a must-have. NextAxiom hyperServices are fully managed building blocks that
are automatically secured, traced, logged, monitored, metered, provisioned and governed. Any
hyperService can also be automatically cached or scheduled. With hyperService solutions, granular
management and instrumentation is not an afterthought; it is built-into the core of the hyperService
Virtual machine.
“Metered” Pay-for-Use Pricing: SAIC’s Smart Grid-as-a-Service was built to drive adoption—not only
with outstanding functionality—but with its breakthrough subscription pricing model. NextAxiom’s
Intelligent Information Flow Platform is well-positioned to support this game-changing approach
with its innovative ‘metered pricing’ plan. NextAxiom’s metered model dramatically drives down the
level of innovation risk by enabling cloud innovators like SAIC to engage with NextAxiom via pay-foruse pricing for each invoked hyperService. Simply stated, the metering model is based on the number
of hyperServices that are executed by the hyperService platform. So, each time a hyperService runs,
the hyperService meter registers a click. To put this in the context of well-known industry standards,
a Web Service Operation (WSDL/SOAP) once imported into the hyperService Platform becomes one
atomic hyperService, and when that hyperService executes, a click is registered on the meter.
By experiencing a compelling ROI on each incremental hyperService developed, the customer and
partner benefits to be derived from wider adoption of the NextAxiom platform become self-evident.
In the words of Tim Crowell of SAIC, “NextAxiom’s metered subscription use pricing is well-aligned
with our own game-changing approach to driving adoption of smart grid innovation. And their
responsiveness to our requests for SGS-centric enhancements, e.g. strong security, demonstrates
their commitment to partnering with innovators like SAIC.”
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Summary: Next Vision, Next Game-Change, NextAxiom
The ‘smart grid’ vision—embraced by electric utilities in the U.S. and around the world—promises a
cleaner, more reliable, more cost-effective and more customer-friendly approach to meeting the
challenge of 21st century energy markets.
SAIC, a market and technology innovator, built its cloud-powered Smart Grid-as-a-Service offering
to change the game in smart grid adoption by enabling world class functionality on a subscription
pricing model.
SAIC’s breakthrough offering leverages the power of NextAxiom hyperServices to provide crossapplication, cross-silo intelligent information flow: a core ingredient of Smart Grid-as-a-Service.
To find out more about the NextAxiom hyperService Platform, and NextAxiom’s commitment to
enabling the silo-free enterprise, go to www.nextaxiom.com.
600 Montgomery Street, Suite 800
San Francisco, CA 94111
T 415 373-1890 F 415 373-1899
[email protected]
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